apple

Who rules the 21st Century? Apple, that's who

When traffic is so heavy to Techcrunch's live blogging of Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference that it's virtually impossible to get through to see a minute-by-minute update of Steve Jobs' keynote, you know that the ground has shifted. Ten years ago, no one cared to cover product releases from Apple.

Then, as MacWorld notes, the iMac hit, and Apple's fortunes turned.

Today, Apple is one of the world's leading brands [PDF] and the furor surrounding the release of its 3G iPhone at fever pitch. Developers have been climbing all over the iPhone, even as Apple's … Read more

Twitter goes into battle mode in anticipation of Apple news

Microblogging service Twitter is a central hub of geek chatter, and if there's anything geeks love to chatter about, it's Apple news.

Consequently, Twitter has bolstered its servers in anticipation of Monday's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), at which healthy doses of Steve Jobs announcements are expected.

"We are expecting approximately 10 times our normal daily traffic so we've made some plans to accommodate this dramatic surge," a post on the company blog explained. Last year at WWDC, the service crashed--as it's often prone to do.

In an extreme situation, the service can go … Read more

SlingPlayer wants to come to the 3G iPhone

Sling Media has plans to connect your Slingbox to Apple's 3G iPhone. But don't get too excited; there's no release date set yet.

Sling showed us a brief demonstration of what the company's mobile application, SlingPlayer, looks like on a jailbroken first-generation iPhone. It's merely a proof of concept, the company says, to demonstrate how superduperexcited it is to get started on an actual product.

This is, of course, all assuming that Steve Jobs announces the 3G iPhone Monday at the opening of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, which is all but assured at this … Read more

Rumor: More iPhone rumors to surface between now and later?

I guess the thinking is if you toss enough possibilities in the air, at least one of them will come down right.

For example this Sunday morning, the Internet suggests that Apple's new iPhone might be cheaper. That it might be thinner. That it might have video chat. That it might have GPS. That it might come with a four-core chip. That it might be late. That it might be here already.

Hopefully, that clears everything up. Come back tomorrow for live coverage of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, when the company is expected to reveal actual details about … Read more

From headphones to earbuds: quiet is the new loud

Rob Walker, the author of the just-released "Buying in," is a marketing connoisseur, an expert in reading the cultural underpinnings of commerce. In his Consumed column for the New York Times Magazine, he examines how technology shapes consumer culture and vice versa. In tomorrow's piece he elaborates on the history of headphones, and how their role evolved in modern society, from the first Bose set to the Sony Walkman to the iPod earbuds.

With the miniaturization of devices, the public exposure of personal space increased. I remember that when I was 14, I came home from school, … Read more

Myanmar or Burma? Apple's dictionary had an opinion

Language Log notes that Apple's Dictionary program (v. 1.02 running in Tiger) gave an interesting pronunciation for "Myanmar:" It's pronounced "Burma."

I would tend to think this is an accident, but it's an interesting one. I've edited articles that required the country to be called Burma for political reasons and others that follow the international convention of calling it Myanmar. Either way, if I were manufacturing this sort of thing I might flag all the controversial geographical terms for careful review.

Another reason it is probably an accident (and not someone'… Read more

3G iPhone in the flesh?

CrunchGear has a spread on what appears to be the new 3G iPhone. Matt Hickey wrote in CrunchGear:

It's thinner than the current model, for sure, with a more MacBook Air-like bezeling. It's got stereo speakers on the back and what appears to be the same screen as the current generation. But the real news here isn't the Exchange support, but the front facing camera for iChat AV.

More here from CrunchGear.

Stay tuned for CNET News.com's Tom Krazit's live coverage from Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference and CEO Steve Jobs' unveiling of the … Read more

Could also be a reference to Flash Gordon

John Gruber points to a piece of "analysis" that's simply too good not to share as far and wide as possible.

Just how will Apple meet expectations? Using the patent application as a guide, Apple appears to be making room on the iPhone for flash memory, which means an end to Apple's standoff with Adobe that's kept iPhones from easily viewing a plethora of Internet videos.

Apple has said that Adobe's flash media player, which is on hundreds of other phones, doesn't perform up to Apple's standards for the iPhone.

So flash … Read more

A smart ad buy

Someone in Apple marketing deserves a gold star for advertising a free seminar on OS X Client Management on InfoWorld's email newsletter.

It's possible this ad buy was simply the product of thinking "Oh, InfoWorld = enterprise, let's advertise there", but InfoWorld has also become the online champion of the SAVE XP!!! campaign, also known as "OMFG, who could have possibly foreseen that Microsoft would kick its clients in the nuts like this?!" or Vista Affectedness Disorder (VAD) for short. This leads to the serendipitous confluence in today's email blast of an ad … Read more

Ripping audio from concert DVDs: Ask the Editors

Q: I have a collection of live concert performances on DVD that I would like to be able to listen to on my iPod. Is there an easy way to rip just the audio, but not the video, and export the soundtrack to my iPod? -Tom (via e-mail)

A: There are many roads to take on a project like this, but I'm going to show you two that are free and both Mac and PC compatible.… Read more